Rick Hess has a new book, The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday's Ideas (Harvard University Press, 2010), which argues that the history of education in the U.S. is littered with earnest reformers whose efforts went for naught or created all sorts of unintended consequences. While it is not as cynical as David Labaree's new book (which I hope to write about in the next week), it is a smart and historically-informed look at reform dilemmas in the abstract. (The fact that I know a number of the historians cited in it … well, I travel in those circles. But you should go through the end notes and read the new books.)
Hess is caught in a common dilemma at the end, having argued on the one hand that reformers typically overpromise and deliver weak tea and then on the other hand wanting to propose radical reform that looks like it would fall to the same dynamic. It's different from the acceptance of tinkering by David Tyack and Larry Cuban–Tyack and Cuban advise working with the grammar of schooling (their term for the consequence of path dependency, itself an ugly bit of jargon that simply means we live with the debris of past choices we can't easily undo). But I'm still feeling a bit of mental whiplash. The old reformers failed by their grandiosity, so I'll outdo them in suggested change! Err…. anyone else see the problem with that? Labaree discovered a clever way out, which is why Hess only earns the half-cynic label from me this year.
I also have to add one small historian's scold: when Hess refers to industrial-age school structures, he's using a rhetorical conceit I read all the time, one that ignores the reality of economic history and school history. Which industrial age? I want to ask. Industrialization occurred over more than a century in the U.S., in different phases. As I explain to my students, the construction of the Erie Canal was as disruptive as the invention of the Bessemer process of producing steel, but they were decades apart. In addition, by his rhetoric Hess is buying into the (false) notion that school history mirrored and fit economic history, as if there were an automated mechanism that created vocational education in perfect harmony with early-20th century industrialization. So much for historical institutionalism and path dependency, I guess… but Hess is far from alone in the conceptual error.
Hess's book adds to the cautionary literature on school reform, covering ground that's different from the usual stuff (including my own).
Thanks for reading these important books, and letting us know that David Labaree (a favorite of mine) has another one out. How timely!!!
Path dependence is a powerful concept, especially when you bring in the cognitive element associated with naturalized routines of all kinds.
Take for example (I don’t know if Hess or Dorn deals with this) the problems that the Industrial Revolution (broadly understood) has bequeathed to the post-Industrial Age, the one we live in. Measures of output and productivity were at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, but become vague and imprecise in the increasingly complex joint efforts of our own times. Direct measures of tangible outputs (horses shod, cotton picked, fields planted or harvested) disappear in the complexity and chaos of modern life.
But factory output measures begat standardized testing, which begat value added measures for teachers. This is an anachronism — a form of path dependence that has become part of our taken-for-granted world — something left over from the Industrial Age. Direct measures have given way to ritual and ceremonial forms, still potent in their own way.
Glen,
I think you’ve just broken the term “path dependency.” Herb Gutmann has the classic explanation on the messiness of “industrial time,” long before Taylor, and David Hounshell is great on the real history of interchangeable parts.
How can path-dependency be broken? My key text is “Path Dependence and Creation,” edited by Raghu Garud and Peter Karnoe (Erlbaum 2001). They contrast “path dependence” with “path creation” and show how the latter is made difficult, if not impossible, by the former.
This goes beyond the social construction of time, which I briefly addressed in my book. As for whether your book on accountability addresses this Industrial Age measurement artifact, I will have to read it.
I meant it as a joke, Glen. And I think you’re falling into the same trap I criticized in my entry by looking at industrialization as if it were a single, monolithic process. That just wasn’t true, and the conflicts over who had control over what were extensive and longlasting (thus my references to Gutmann and Hounshell).
David Hounshell (1985) has the spectacular Diego Rivera murals from River Rouge, the Ford Plant. But he doesn’t address the role of the micrometer (calipers) in making Ford possible, nor the socio-institutional changes that made the Industrial Revolution possible. (This is why I think modern education measurement theory is its legacy to us today.) I couldn’t find anything on Herbert Gutmann, however.
Doesn’t everyone know that the Industrial Revolution is an umbrella term that covers a long period of time, covers both technological advances, and socio-institutional changes and innovations? It is multi-faceted, multi-dimensional. I keep coming back to Rorabaugh’s The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America (Oxford 1986) for the texture and gaining a tactile sense of the life and times during that period — the decline of Apprenticeship, and the alternatives that eventually produced public education.
The coming of the Factory Age brought with it the loss of control over how and when a job was done — one of the reasons that industrialization was initially resisted. “It seemed like the complete destruction of the value of work to people,” says Greg Clark, economics prof at U of C Davis. This is why workers had to be paid a premium — as much as 40% beyond the going wage — to live under employer control.
Education, in most cases, is also a controlled environment, similar to what is found on the factory floor, where the loss of control is a characteristic feature. Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich, and John Dewey (?) tried to reverse this.
In the complexity of collaborative endeavors today, we are even further removed from the finished product, and have to wait for the gratification that comes with seeing a goal finally accomplished. This is also true of public education: years and years are invested, but the pay off lies far ahead in a future you cannot see. Delayed rewards of this kind are exceedingly difficult to bear, especially when the future seems so grim. (Quotes and ideas from WSJ 2/19/2008)
Thinking the Industrial Revolution was a “cause” may be shortchanging the intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment. We aren’t out of the woods/off the ride yet.
Ford would have imploded, calipers or none if it hadn’t been for the development of planning and supply chain management. It came in the form of Robert McNamara.
I’m toying with the idea of reversing myself on this, after looking at Labaree on educationalization again.
http://www.stanford.edu/~dlabaree/publications/Educationalization_Paper-Ed_Theory_11-08.pdf
It is evident that key features of medieval schooling (location, moral control, subordination of students, established formal hierarchies with jurisdictions, rules, etc.) became part of the socio-institutional raw-material utilized by modern factories in their formation; that is, the social technology that went into Industrialization.
When you consider the experiments of Robert Owens, and Lowell’s Waltham method, the connection between the two is more obvious. Even John Locke (influenced by an early French educationist) espoused the curative powers of education.
Labaree has moved much closer to John W. Meyers’ “world polity” modern of education that equates nation building with public education (Prussia, Austria, etc.), but this remains quite slippery for me — and slightly paranoid, I think. No matter: Labaree has cast his lot with the neo-institutionalists in the essay above. We welcome him with open arms.